Empowering Extreme Automation via Zero-Touch Operations and GPU Parallelization

The extream automation model attracts increasingly more manufacturing enterprises to deploy their services and applications on the emerging automation infrastructure that come with extreme range of new requirements. These include smart collaborative factories, personalized services with dramatic improvements in customer- experience, massive capacity, imperceptible latency, ultra-high reliability, global webscale reach, and support for massive machine-tomachine communication. The ultimate challenge is to have an infrastructure with a scalable performance. Straight forward thinking may think of scalable performance in terms of adding additional processing capabilities to a manufacturing problem set or a simulation. Because more parallelization means more communication and data movement between the independent services and tasks, the result often is even more communications between them. The benefits of such collective communication include: Cross-domain IT automation; Information, Analytics and Data Transparency; DevOps Integration; and Digital Cognitive Systems. The authors argue that all the above benefits cannot be achieved for a harmonized and effective extreme automation environment without the enforcement and the availability of following two notions: (1) Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP), where ZTP is the feature that allows the devices to be provisioned and configured automatically, eliminating most of the manual labor involved with a collective communication; and (2) Parallelization of GPUs based on the use general-purpose computing on graphics processing Units (GPGPU).